Jonathan Franzen - Purity

Three weeks later, the German Christian Youth Conference invited him to speak in West Berlin. He presumed (though you could never know for sure; that was the beauty of it) that the conference had been thoroughly infiltrated by his cousin once removed, the spymaster Markus Wolf, because the invitation came forwarded from the Foreign Ministry with a notice to pick up a visa that had already been granted. It was laughably obvious that if he crossed the border he wouldn’t be allowed to reenter the country. Equally obvious was that the invitation was a warning from his father, a punishment for his indiscretion at the dacha.

Everyone else in the country wanted permission to travel even more than they wanted cars. The bait of attending some miserable three-day trade conference in Copenhagen was enough to entice the ordinary citizen to rat out colleagues, siblings, friends. Andreas felt singular in every way, but in none more than his disdain for travel. How the royal Danish poisoner and his lying queen had wanted their son out of the castle! He felt himself to be the rose and fair expectancy of the state, its product and its antic antithesis, and so his first responsibility was to not budge from Berlin. He needed his so-called parents to know that he was still there on Siegfeldstraße, knowing what he knew about them.

But it was lonely to be singular, and loneliness bred paranoia, and he soon reached the point of imagining that Petra had set him up, the whole rigmarole about sex in churches and the need for a bath a ruse to lure him into violating his tacit agreement with his parents. Now every time another at-risk girl appeared at his office door with that familiar burning look in her eyes, he remembered how uncharacteristically selfish he’d been with Petra, and how humiliated he’d been by the police, and instead of obliging the girl he teased her and drove her away. He wondered if he’d been lying to himself about girls forever — if the hatred he’d felt for number fifty-three was not only real but retroactively applicable to numbers one through fifty-two. If, far from indulging in irony at the state’s expense, he’d been seduced by the state at his point of least resistance.

He spent the following spring and summer depressed, and therefore all the more preoccupied with sex, but since he suddenly distrusted both himself and the girls, he denied himself the relief of it. He curtailed his individual conferences and ceased trolling the Jugendklubs for at-risk kids. Though he was jeopardizing the best job an East German in his position could hope to find, he lay on his bed all day and read British novels, detective and otherwise, forbidden and otherwise. (Having been force-fed Steinbeck and Dreiser and Dos Passos by his mother, he had little interest in American writing. Even the best Americans were annoyingly naïve. Life in the U.K. sucked more, in a good way.) Eventually he determined that what had depressed him was his childhood bed, the bed itself, in the Müggelsee house, and the feeling that he’d never left it: that the more he rebelled against his parents and the more he made his life a reproach to theirs, the more deeply he rooted himself in the same childish relation to them. But it was one thing to identify the source of his depression, quite another to do anything about it.

He was seven months celibate on the October afternoon when the church’s young “vicar” came to see him about the girl in the sanctuary. The vicar wore all the vestments of renegade-church cliché—full beard, check; faded jean jacket, check; mod copper crucifix, check — but was usefully insecure in the face of Andreas’s superior street experience.

“I first noticed her two weeks ago,” he said, sitting down on the floor. He seemed to have read in some book that sitting on the floor established rapport and conveyed Christlike humility. “Sometimes she stays in the sanctuary for an hour, sometimes until midnight. Not praying, just doing her homework. I finally asked if we could help her. She looked scared and said she was sorry — she’d thought she was allowed to be here. I told her the church is always open to anyone in need. I wanted to start a conversation, but all she wanted was to hear that she wasn’t breaking any rules.”

“So?”

“Well, you are the youth counselor.”

“The sanctuary isn’t exactly on my beat.”

“It’s understandable that you’re burned out. We haven’t minded your taking some time for yourself.”

“I appreciate it.”

“I’m concerned about the girl, though. I talked to her again yesterday and asked if she was in trouble — my fear is that she’s been abused. She speaks so softly it’s hard to understand her, but she seemed to be saying that the authorities are already aware of her, and so she can’t go to them. Apparently she’s here because she has nowhere else to go.”

“Aren’t we all.”

“She might say more to you than to me.”

“How old is she?”

“Young. Fifteen, sixteen. Also extraordinarily pretty.”

Underage, abused, and pretty. Andreas sighed.

“You’ll need to come out of your room at some point,” the vicar suggested.

When Andreas went up to the sanctuary and saw the girl in the next-to-rear pew, he immediately experienced her beauty as an unwelcome complication, a specificity that distracted him from the universal female body part that had interested him for so long. She was dark-haired and dark-eyed, unrebelliously dressed, and was sitting with a Free German Youth erectness of posture, a textbook open on her lap. She looked like a good girl, the sort he never saw in the basement. She didn’t raise her head as he approached.

“Will you talk to me?” he said.

She shook her head.

“You talked to the vicar.”

“Only for a minute,” she murmured.

“OK. Why don’t I sit down behind you, where you don’t have to see me. And then, if you—”

“Please don’t do that.”

“All right. I’ll stay in sight.” He took the pew in front of her. “I’m Andreas. I’m a counselor here. Will you tell me your name?”

She shook her head.

“Are you here to pray?”

She smirked. “Is there a God?”

“No, of course not. Where would you get an idea like that?”

“Somebody built this church.”

“Somebody was thinking wishfully. It makes no sense to me.”

She raised her head, as if he’d slightly interested her. “Aren’t you afraid of getting in trouble?”

“With who? The minister? God’s only a word he uses against the state. Nothing in this country exists except in reference to the state.”

“You shouldn’t say things like that.”

“I’m only saying what the state itself says.”

He looked down at her legs, which were of a piece with the rest of her.

“Are you very afraid of getting in trouble?” he said.

She shook her head.

“Afraid of getting someone else in trouble, then. Is that it?”

“I come here because this is nowhere. It’s nice to be nowhere for a while.”

“Nowhere is more nowhere than this place, I agree.”

She smiled faintly.

“When you look in the mirror,” he said, “what do you see? Someone pretty?”

“I don’t look in mirrors.”

“What would you see if you did?”

“Nothing good.”

“Something bad? Something harmful?”

She shrugged.

“Why didn’t you want me to sit down behind you?”

“I like to see who I’m talking to.”

“So we are talking. You were only pretending that you weren’t going to talk to me. You were being self-dramatizing — playing games.”

Sudden honest confrontation was part of his bag of counseling tricks. That he was sick of these tricks didn’t mean they didn’t still work.