Jonathan Franzen - Purity

To sustain his interest, he had the inspiration of making pencil drawings of naked girls. His first drawings were extremely crude, but he discovered that he had some talent, especially when he could work from a model in an illustrated magazine, undressing her as he copied, and that by drawing with one hand and touching himself with the other he could prolong the pleasurable suspense for hours. The less successful drawings he came on, balled up, and threw away. The better ones he saved and improved and delayed adding filthy captions to, because, although the idealized faces and bodies remained lovely to him, the words he imputed to them embarrassed him the next day.

He informed his parents that he was quitting football. His mother approved ipso facto of everything he did, but his father said that if he quit he would have to find other healthful and commensurately time-consuming activities, and so, one evening, on the way home from practice, he jumped off the Rhinstraße bridge and down into the trashy bushes where, as it happened, he’d last seen the ghost. He broke his ankle and told his parents that he’d jumped on a stupid dare.

The one thing everyone in the Republic had plenty of was time. Whatever you didn’t do today really could be put off until tomorrow. Every other commodity may have been scarce, but never time, especially if you had a broken ankle and were extremely intelligent. Homework was a laugh for a boy who’d been reading since three and doing multiplication since five, there was a limit to the pleasure he could take in entertaining the boys at school with his intelligence, the girls didn’t interest him, and ever since he’d seen the ghost he’d stopped enjoying conversations with his mother. She was as interesting as ever, she dangled her interestingness at the dinner table like a piece of luscious fruit, but he’d lost his appetite for it. He lived in a vast proletarian desert of time and boringness, and so he didn’t see anything wrong or excessive in devoting a good chunk of each day to producing beauty with his hands, transforming blank paper into female faces that owed their very existence to him, transforming his dinky worm into something big and hard. He became so unashamed of his drawings that he took to working on the faces on the living-room sofa, sometimes touching his pants to maintain a moderate level of stimulation, sometimes becoming so absorbed in his art that he forgot to be stimulated.

“Whose face is that?” his mother asked him one day, looking over his shoulder. Her tone was coy.

“No one’s,” he said. “It’s just a face.”

“It must be someone’s face. Is it a girl you know at school?”

“No.”

“You seem very practiced. Is this what you’ve been working on with your door closed?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have other drawings that I can see?”

“No.”

“I’m really impressed with your talent. Can’t I see your other drawings?”

“I throw them away when I’m done with them.”

“You have no others?”

“That’s right.”

His mother frowned. “Are you doing this to hurt me?”

“Honestly, the thought of you never crosses my mind. You should be worried if it did.”

“I can protect you,” she said, “but you have to talk to me.”

“I don’t want to talk to you.”

“It’s normal to be excited by pictures at your age. It’s healthy to have urges at your age. I’m just interested in knowing whose face that is.”

“Mother, it’s an invented face .”

“Your drawing looks so personal, though. Like you know very well who that’s supposed to be.”

Without another word, he put the drawing in a binder and went and shut himself in his bedroom. When he opened the binder again, the penciled face looked loathsome to him. Hideous, hideous. He tore up the paper. His mother knocked on the door and opened it.

“Why did you jump off the bridge?” she said.

“I told you. It was a dare.”

“Were you trying to harm yourself? It’s important that you tell me the truth. It would be the end of the world for me if you did what my father did to me.”

“Joachim dared me, just like I said.”

“You’re too intelligent to do something so stupid on a dare.”

“All right. I wanted to break my leg so I could spend more time masturbating.”

“That’s not funny.”

“ Please go away so I can masturbate.” The words just popped out of his mouth, but the shock of hearing them jolted something loose in him. He jumped to his feet and came at his mother, trembling, grinning, and said, “ Please go away so I can masturbate. Please go away so I can —”

“Stop!”

“I’m not like your father. I’m like you . But at least I keep to myself. I don’t harm anyone but myself.”

She blanched at the goal he’d scored. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“No, of course not. I’m the crazy one. I can’t even tell a hawk from a handsaw .” He knew the line in English.

“Enough with the Hamletizing.”

“ A little more than kin, a little less than kind .”

“You have some thoroughly wrong idea,” she said. “You got it from a book and it annoys me, all this hinting. I’m starting to think your father’s right — I let you read things when you were too young for them. I can still protect you, but you have to confide in me. You have to tell me what you’re really thinking.”

“I’m thinking — nothing.”

“Andreas.”

“Please go away so I can masturbate!”

He was protecting her, not the other way around, and when his father came home from yet another round of factory tours and informed him that he had a date with a psychologist, he assumed that his mission in the counseling sessions would be to continue protecting her. His father wouldn’t have entrusted him to anyone but the most politically rock-solid, Stasi-certified psychologist. However much Andreas was coming to hate his mother, there was no way that he was telling the psychologist about the ghost.

The Republic’s capital wasn’t just spiritually flat but literally flat. Such few hills as it had were composed of rubble from the war, and it was on a minor one of these, a grassy berm behind the back fence of the football pitch, that Andreas had first seen the ghost. Beyond the berm were disused rail tracks and a narrow stretch of wasteland too irrationally shaped to have fit into any five-year development plan to date. The ghost must have come up from the tracks on the late afternoon when Andreas, winded from sprints, hung his hands on the fence and pressed his face into its links to catch his breath. At the top of the rise, maybe twenty meters away, a gaunt and bearded figure in a ratty sheepskin jacket was looking at him. Feeling his privacy and privilege invaded, Andreas turned around and put his back to the fence. When he returned to running sprints and glanced up at the hill, the ghost was gone.

But he appeared again at dusk the following day, again looking directly at Andreas, singling him out. This time some of the other players saw the ghost and shouted at him—“Stinking deviant!” “Go wipe yourself!” etc. — with the morally untroubled contempt that club members had for anyone not playing by society’s rules. You couldn’t get in trouble for reviling a bum; quite the opposite. One of the boys peeled off and went to the fence to shout abuse from a closer range. Seeing him approach, the ghost ducked behind the hill and out of sight.

After that, he appeared after dark, loitering at the point on the hill where the light from the pitch ended, his head and shoulders dimly visible. Running up and down the pitch, Andreas kept looking to see if the ghost was still there. Sometimes he was, sometimes he wasn’t; twice he seemed to beckon to Andreas with a motion of his head. But he was always gone by the time the final whistle blew.