Jonathan Franzen - Purity

He watched her pretty fingers stub the cigarette out. The agony of withdrawal from her was a measure of the depth of his addiction.

“You were fucking a grad student for six years,” he said. “You fucked him for so long that he grew up to be your colleague.”

“No,” she said calmly, almost as if she were bored. “I would never have done that.”

“You were alone at home the entire fall when I was conceived.”

“No. Your father never went on trips that long.”

“And then, after I was born, you kept on fucking your colleague.”

“That’s entirely false,” she said. “But I suppose it doesn’t matter, since you have no intention of believing me. I do ask, though, that you not use the word fuck with your mother.”

This reproach, mild though it was, was all but unprecedented. Her entire method as a mother was to abjure direct correction.

“Why would a well-educated man I’ve never seen,” he said, “start following me around at the football pitch and tell me a story like that?”

Her face became masklike.

“Mother? Why would a person do that?”

She blinked and came to. “I have no idea,” she said. “There are all kinds of strange people in the world. If this is what’s been upsetting you all this time…” She frowned.

“Yes?”

“It occurs to me that we have a third option. We can have you admitted to a mental hospital.”

He burst out laughing. “For real? That’s the third option?”

“I’m afraid we may have ignored your cries for help for far too long. But now you’ve made one that we can’t ignore, and it’s not too late for help. Now that I think about it, getting you the help you need may be the most attractive of all our options.”

“You think I’m mentally ill.”

“No, never. Not a mental illness. But extreme emotional distress. You experienced some kind of trauma at the football pitch that you didn’t tell us about. A thing like that can fester.”

“Indeed.”

Her gaze wandered away, out into the hallway. “Andreas, consider it,” she said. “My family has a history of emotional distress. I’m afraid that some of that may have been passed on to you.”

“Skipping a generation, of course.”

“I think what you’ve done to your father and me qualifies as extreme disturbance. I think I have a right to lie down on the bathroom floor.”

“When you go back there, take a pillow. It’s a hard floor.”

“I admit that I’ve had mood swings over the years. But that’s all they are, mood swings. I’m sorry if that was hard to live with. I don’t think it’s enough to explain what you’ve done to us.”

“I have my own unique mental illness.”

“Well,” she said, turning away from him. “Please consider it. I think it’s good that we had this honest conversation.”

It didn’t speak well of his sanity that he actively had to squelch the impulse to run after her and kill her with whatever came to hand. Then again, he did squelch it, which spoke better of his sanity. And his next impulse — to run out to the street and find a girl he could bang — was not only reasonable but fully practicable. His bohemian credentials were golden now. He threw some clothes and books into a duffel bag. In the seven years that followed, he saw his mother only twice, accidentally, from a distance.

* * *

The drizzle persisted through the week, with intermittent harder showers, and for three nights he obsessed about the rain, wondering whether it was good or bad. When he managed to sleep for a few minutes, he had dreams which he ordinarily would have found laughably obvious — a body not in the place where he’d left it, feet protruding from under his bed when people entered his room — but which under the circumstances were true nightmares, of the sort from which he ordinarily would have been relieved to awaken. But being awake was even worse now. He considered the plus side of rain: no moon. And the minus side: deep footprints and tire tracks. The plus side: easy digging and slippery stairs. And the minus side: slippery stairs. The plus side: cleansing. And the minus side: mud … The anxiety had a life of its own, it churned and churned. The one thought that brought relief was that Annagret was unquestionably suffering even more. The relief was to feel connected to her. The relief was love, the astonishment of experiencing her distress more keenly than he experienced his own; of caring more about her than about himself. As long as he could hold that thought and exist within it, he could halfway breathe.

There is a divinity that shapes our ends …

At three thirty on Thursday afternoon he packed a knapsack with a hunk of bread, a pair of gloves, a roll of piano wire, and an extra pair of pants. He had the feeling that he’d slept not at all the previous night, but maybe he had, maybe a little bit. He left the rectory basement by the back stairs and emerged in the courtyard, where a light rain was falling. Earnest embarrassments were smoking cigarettes in the ground-floor meeting room, the lights already on.

On the train he took a window seat and pulled the hood of his rain parka over his face, pretending to sleep. When he got out at Rahnsdorf, he kept his eyes on the ground and moved more slowly than the early commuters, letting them disperse. The sky was nearly dark. As soon as he was alone he walked more briskly, as if he were out for exercise. Two cars, not police, hissed past him. In the drizzle he looked like nobody. When he rounded the last bend before the house and didn’t see anyone on the street, he broke into a lope. The soil here was sandy and drained well. At least on the gravel of the driveway, he wasn’t leaving footprints.

No matter how many times he’d gone over the logistics in his head, he couldn’t quite see how they would work: how he could conceal himself completely and still be within striking distance. He was desperate to keep Annagret out of it, to keep her safe in her essential goodness, but he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to. His anxiety the previous night had swirled around the image of some awful three-person scrum that would leave her trust in him shattered.

He strung the piano wire between two railing posts, across the second of the wooden steps to the back porch. Tightening it at a level low enough that she could not too obviously step over it, he dug the wire into the wood of the posts and flaked some paint off them, but there was nothing to be done about that. In the middle of his first night of anxiety, he’d gotten out of bed and gone to the rectory’s basement staircase to conduct a test of tripping on the second step. He’d been surprised by how hard he’d pitched forward, in spite of knowing he was going to trip — he’d nearly sprained his wrist. But he wasn’t as athletic as the stepfather, he wasn’t a bodybuilder …

He went around to the front of the dacha and took off his boots. He wondered if the two VoPos he’d met the previous winter were patrolling again tonight. He remembered the senior one’s hope that they would meet again. “We’ll see,” he said aloud. Hearing himself, he noticed that his anxiety had abated. Much better to be doing than to be thinking about doing. He entered the house and took the key to the toolshed from the hook where it had hung since he was little.

He went outside again and put on his boots and stepped carefully around the edge of the back yard, mindful of footprints. Once he was safely in the toolshed, which had no windows, he groped for a flashlight and found one on the usual shelf. In its light, he checked inventory. Wheelbarrow — yes. Shovel — yes. He was shocked to see, by his watch, that it was already nearly six o’clock. He turned off the flashlight and took it out into the drizzle with the shovel.