Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“You know we won’t be able to see each other for a very long time, whichever way it goes. No contact of any kind.”

“That’s almost better.”

“Think about it, though. If you came here instead, we could see each other every day.”

“I don’t think that’s better.”

He looked up at the stained ceiling of the sanctuary and considered what a cosmic joke it was that the first person his heart had freely chosen was someone he not only couldn’t have but wouldn’t even be allowed to see. And yet he felt all right about it. His powerlessness itself was sweet. Who would have guessed that? Various clichés about love, stupid adages and song lyrics, flashed through his head.

“I’m late for judo,” Annagret said. “I have to go.”

He closed his eyes so that he didn’t have to see her leave.

* * *

It was so easy to blame the mother. Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death: why not blame the person who’d stuck you with a life? OK, maybe it was unfair. But your mother could always blame her own mother, who herself could blame the mother, and so on back to the Garden. People had been blaming the mother forever, and most of them, Andreas was pretty sure, had mothers less blameworthy than his.

An accident of brain development stacked the deck against children: the mother had three or four years to fuck with your head before your hippocampus began recording lasting memories. You’d been talking to your mom since you were one year old and listening to her for even longer, but you couldn’t remember a single word of what you or she had said before your hippocampus kicked into gear. Your consciousness opened its little eyes for the first time and discovered that you were headlong in love with your mom. Being an exceptionally bright and receptive little boy, you also already believed in the historical inevitability of the socialist workers’ state. Your mother herself, in her secret heart, might not have believed in it, but you did. You’d been a person long before you had a conscious self. Your little body had once been deeper inside your mother than your father’s dick had ever gone, you’d squeezed your entire goddamned head through her pussy, and then for the longest time you’d sucked on her tits whenever you felt like it, and you couldn’t for the life of you remember it. You found yourself self-alienated from the get-go.

Andreas’s father was the second-youngest Party member ever elevated to the Central Committee, and he had the most creative job in the Republic. As the chief state economist, he was responsible for the wholesale massaging of data, for demonstrating increases in productivity where there weren’t any, for balancing a budget that every year drifted farther from reality, for adjusting official exchange rates to maximize the budgetary impact of whatever hard currency the Republic could finagle or extort, for magnifying the economy’s few successes and making optimistic excuses for its many failures. The top Party leaders could afford to be stupid or cynical about his numbers, but he himself had to believe in the story they told. This required political conviction, self-deception, and, perhaps especially, self-pity.

A refrain of Andreas’s childhood was his father’s litany of the unfairnesses with which the German workers’ state contended. The Nazis had persecuted the Communists and nearly destroyed the Soviet Union, which had then been fully justified in exacting reparations, and America had diverted scarce resources from its own oppressed working class and sent them to West Germany to create an illusion of prosperity, luring weak and misguided East Germans across the border. “No state in world history has ever started at a greater disadvantage than ours,” he liked to say. “Beginning with sheer rubble, and with every hand raised against us, we’ve succeeded in feeding and clothing and housing and educating our citizens and providing every one of them with a level of security that only the wealthiest in the West enjoy.” The phrase every hand raised against us never failed to move Andreas. His father seemed to him the greatest of men, the wise and kindhearted champion of the conspired-against and spat-upon German worker. Was there anything more worthy of sympathy than a suffering underdog nation persevering and triumphing through sheer faith in itself? With every hand raised against it?

His father was overworked, however, and traveled a lot to Moscow and to other Eastern Bloc countries. Andreas’s real love affair was with his mother, Katya, who was no less perfect and much more available. She was pretty and lively and quick; rigid only in her politics. She had boyishly short hair of unrivaled redness, blazing but natural-looking redness, the product of a Western bottle obtainable only by the very privileged. She was a jewel of the Republic, a person of great physical and intellectual charm who’d elected to stay behind while others like her were getting out. Nobody toed the Party line with greater ease. Andreas had gone to lectures of hers and seen the hold she had on her classes, the way she mesmerized them with the redness of her hair and the torrent of words she delivered without notes. She could quote whole chunks of Shakespeare from memory, whatever random lines her thought process happened to call for, and then freely translate them into German for the slower students, and everything she said was shot through with orthodoxy: the Danish tragedy a parable of false consciousness and its downfall, Polonius a travesty of the bourgeois intelligentsia, the blond prince a prophetic prefigurement of Marx, Horatio his Engels, and Fortinbras the Lenin-like fulfiller and guarantor of revolutionary consciousness, arriving at the Danish equivalent of the Finland Station. If anyone was put off by how obviously well Katya thought of herself, if anyone found her liveliness unsettling (safety lay in drabness), she had her position as chair of her division’s political oversight committee to set their minds at rest.

She also came from heroic stock. In 1933, after the burning of the Reichstag and the banning of the Communist Party, the smart or lucky party leaders fled to the Soviet Union for advanced training by the NKVD while the others dispersed across Europe. Katya’s mother held a British passport and managed to emigrate to Liverpool with her husband and their two girls. The father found work at the dockyards and did enough spying for the Soviets to stay in their good graces; Katya claimed to remember Kim Philby coming to dinner once. When the war broke out, the family was politely but firmly relocated to the Welsh countryside and waited out the war there. Minus Katya’s older sister, who’d married a swing-band leader, the parents returned to East Berlin, marched in a celebratory parade, received public commendations for their resistance to fascism, and then were quietly exiled to Rostock by the NKVD-trained leaders whom the Soviets had installed in power. Only Katya was allowed to remain in Berlin, because she was a student. Her father hanged himself in Rostock in 1948; her mother had a nervous breakdown and was warehoused in a locked ward until she, too, died. Andreas later came to think it possible that the secret police had assisted his grandfather’s suicide and his grandmother’s breakdown, but such consolation was politically foreclosed to Katya. Her own star rose with the eclipse of her parents, who could now safely be remembered as martyrs. She became a full professor and eventually married a university colleague who’d weathered the war in the Soviet Union, along with his Wolf relatives, and learned his economics there.

Nothing about Andreas’s childhood with her was ordinary. She permitted him everything, and in return she required only that he be with her constantly, asked only that he be delighted with her. The delight came naturally to him. Her tenure at the university was in Anglistik , and from the beginning she spoke both German and English at home with him, best of all in the same sentence. Mixing up the two languages was endless fun. Du hast ein bloody awful mess gemacht! The Vereinigten Staaten are rotten! Is that a fart oder eine Ausfahrt I smell? Willst du ein otheres Stück creamcake? What goeth in thy little head on? She refused to entrust him to day care, because she wanted him all to herself, and she had the privilege to get away with it. He started reading so young he didn’t remember learning to do it. He did remember sleeping in her bed when his father was away; also remembered his father’s snoring when he tried to join the two of them at night, remembered feeling scared of the snores, remembered her getting up and taking him back to his room and sleeping with him there. He was apparently incapable of doing anything she didn’t like. When he had a tantrum, she sat down on the floor and cried with him, and if this upset him all the more, she became all the more upset herself, until finally the funniness of her make-believe distress distracted him from his own distress. Then he laughed, and she laughed with him.