Jonathan Franzen - Purity

When he came around the side of the house, Annagret ran to him and kissed him heedlessly, with open mouth, her hands in his hair. She was heartbreakingly teenaged, and he didn’t know what to do. He wanted to give her what she wanted — he wanted it himself — but he was aware that what she ought to want, in the larger scheme, was to not get caught. It was painful to be older and more rational, painful to be the enforcer. He took her face in his gloved hands and said, “I love you, but we have to stop.”

She shivered and burrowed into him. “Let’s have one night and then be caught. I’ve done all I can.”

“Let’s not be caught and then have many nights.”

“He wasn’t such a bad person, he just needed help.”

“You need to help me for one minute. One minute and then you can lie down and sleep.”

“It’s too awful.”

“All you have to do is steady the wheelbarrow. You can keep your eyes shut. Can you do that for me?”

In the darkness, he thought he could see her nod. He left her and picked his way back to the toolshed. It would be a lot easier to get the body in the wheelbarrow if she helped him, but he found that he welcomed the prospect of wrangling the body by himself. He was protecting her from direct contact, keeping her as safe as he could, and he wanted her to know it.

The body was in coveralls, work clothes from the power plant, suitable for motorcycle maintenance but not for a hot date in the country. It was hard to escape the conclusion that the fucker really hadn’t intended to come out here tonight, but Andreas did his best to escape it. He rolled the body onto its back. It was heavy with gym-trained muscle. He found its wallet and zipped it into his own jacket, and then he tried to lift the body by its coveralls, but the fabric ripped. He was obliged to apply a bear hug to wrestle the head and torso onto the wheelbarrow.

The wheelbarrow tipped over sideways. Neither he nor Annagret said anything. They just tried again.

There were further struggles behind the shed. She had to help him by pushing on the wheelbarrow’s handles while he pulled from the front. The footprint situation was undoubtedly appalling. When they were finally beside the grave, they stood and caught their breath. Water was softly dripping from pine needles, the scent of the needles mixing with the sharp and vaguely cocoa smell of fresh-turned earth.

“That wasn’t so bad,” she said.

“I’m sorry you had to help.”

“It’s just … I don’t know.”

“What is it?”

“Are we sure there’s not a God?”

“It’s a pretty far-fetched idea, don’t you think?”

“I have the strongest feeling that he’s still alive somewhere.”

“Where, though? How could that be?”

“It’s just a feeling I have.”

“He used to be your friend. This is so much harder for you than for me.”

“Do you think he was in pain? Was he frightened?”

“Honestly, no. It happened very fast. And now that he’s dead he can’t remember pain. It’s as if he’d never existed.”

He wanted her to believe this, but he wasn’t sure he believed it himself. If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. And so, if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, as everyone would agree, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math here, in the infinitesimal duration of a life. No death could be quick enough to excuse inflicting pain. If you were capable of doing the math, it meant that a morality was lurking in it.

“Well,” Annagret said in a harder voice. “If there is a God, I guess my friend is on his way to hell for raping me. I’d personally be happier if he was in heaven. Putting him in a hole is enough for me. But they say God plays by tougher rules.”

“Who told you that?”

“My father, before he died. He couldn’t figure out what God was punishing him for.”

She hadn’t talked about her father before. If time hadn’t been passing, Andreas would have wanted to hear everything, know everything about her. He loved that she wasn’t consistent; was possibly even somewhat dishonest. This was the first time she’d used the word rape , and she was seeming less unfamiliar with religion than she’d made herself out to be, at the church. His wish to puzzle her out was as strong as his wish to lie down with her; the two desires almost amounted to the same thing. But time was passing. He didn’t have a muscle that wasn’t hurting, but he jumped into the grave and set about deepening it.

“I’m the one who should be doing that.”

“Go in the shed and lie down. Try to sleep.”

“I wish we knew each other better.”

“Me, too. But you need to try to sleep.”

She watched in silence for a long time, half an hour, while he dug. He had a confusing twinned sense of her closeness and complete otherness. Together, they’d killed a man, but she had her own thoughts, her own motives, so close to him and yet so separate. And again he felt grateful to her, because she wasn’t just smart in his male way, she was smart in female ways he wasn’t. She’d seen immediately how important it was to be together — what a ceaseless torture it would be to remain apart, after what they’d done — while he hadn’t seen it until now. She was just fifteen, but she was quick and he was slow.

Only after she went to lie down did his mind shift back into logistics mode. He dug until three o’clock and then, without pausing, dragged and rolled the body into the hole and jumped down after it to wrestle it into a supine position. He didn’t want to have to remember the face, so he sprinkled some dirt over it. Then he turned on the flashlight and inspected the body for jewelry. There was a heavy watch, not inexpensive, and a sleazy gold neck chain. The watch came off easily, but to break the chain he had to plant a hand on the dirt-covered forehead and yank. Fortunately nothing was real, at least not for long. Infinitesimally soon, the eternity of his own death would commence and render all of this unreal.

In two hours he had the hole refilled and was jumping on the dirt, compacting it. When he returned to the toolshed, the beam of the flashlight found Annagret huddled in a corner of it, shivering, her arms around her knees. He didn’t know which was more unbearable to see, her beauty or her suffering. He turned the light off.

“Did you sleep?”

“Yeah. I woke up freezing.”

“I don’t suppose you noticed when the first train comes.”

“Five thirty-eight.”

“You’re remarkable.”

“He was the one who checked the time. It wasn’t me.”

“Do you want to go over your story with me?”

“No, I’ve been thinking about it. I know what to say.”

The mood between the two of them felt cold and chalky now. For the first time, it occurred to Andreas that they might have no future together — that they’d done a terrible thing and would henceforth dislike each other for it. Love crushed by crime. Already it seemed like a very long time since she’d run to him and kissed him. Maybe she’d been right; maybe they should have spent one night together and then turned themselves in.

“If nothing happens in a year,” he said, “and if you think you’re not being watched, it might be safe to see each other again.”

“It might as well be a hundred years,” she said bitterly.

“I’ll be thinking of you the whole time. Every day. Every hour.”

He heard her standing up.

“I’m going to the station now,” she said.

“Wait twenty minutes. You don’t want to be seen standing around there.”

“I have to warm up. I’ll run somewhere and then go to the station.”