Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“I’m sorry about this.”

“Not as sorry as I am.”

“Are you angry at me? You can be. Whatever you need to be is fine with me.”

“I’m just sick. They’ll ask me one question, and everything will be obvious. I feel too sick to pretend.”

“You came home at nine thirty and he wasn’t there. You went to bed because you weren’t feeling well …”

“I already said we don’t have to go over it.”

“I’m sorry.”

She moved toward the door, bumped into him, and continued on outside. Somewhere in the darkness, she stopped. “So I guess I’ll see you in a hundred years.”

“Annagret.”

He could hear the earth sucking at her footsteps, see her dark form receding across the back yard. He’d never in his life felt more tired. But finishing his tasks was more bearable than thinking about her. Using the flashlight sparingly, he covered the grave with older and then fresher pine needles, did his best to kick away footprints and wheelbarrow ruts, and artfully strewed leaf litter and lawn waste. His boots and jacket sleeves were hopelessly muddy, but he was too spent to muster anxiety about it. At least he could change his pants.

The mist had given way to a warmer fog that made the arrival of daylight curiously sudden. Fog was not a bad thing. He policed the back yard for footprints and wheelbarrow tracks. Only when the light was nearly full-strength did he return to the back steps to remove the trip wire. There was more blood than he’d expected on the steps, less vomit than he’d feared on the bushes by the railing. He was seeing everything now as if through a long tube. He filled and refilled a watering can at the outside spigot, to wash away blood.

The last thing he did was to check the kitchen for signs of disturbance. All he found was wetness in the sink from the drink he’d taken. It would be dry by evening. He locked the front door behind him and set out walking toward Rahnsdorf. By eight thirty he was back in the basement of the rectory. Peeling off his jacket, he realized that he still had the dead man’s wallet and jewelry, but he could sooner have flown to the moon than dispose of them now; he could barely untie his muddy boots. He lay down on his bed to wait for the police.

* * *

They didn’t come. Not that day, that week, or that season — they never came at all.

And why didn’t they? Among the least plausible of Andreas’s hypotheses was that he and Annagret had committed the perfect crime. Certainly it was possible that his parents hadn’t seen what a wreck he’d made of the dacha’s back yard; the first heavy snow of the season had come the following week. But nobody had noticed the unforgettably beautiful girl on either of her train trips? Nobody in her neighborhood had seen her and Horst walking to the station? Nobody had looked into where she’d been going in the weeks before the killing? Nobody had questioned her hard enough to break her? The last Andreas had seen of her, a feather would have broken her.

Less implausible was that the Stasi had investigated the mother, and that her addiction and pilferage had come to light. The Stasi would naturally have interested itself in a missing informal collaborator. If the mother was in Stasi detention, the question wasn’t whether she’d confess to the murder (or, depending on how the Stasi chose to play it, to the crime of assisting Horst’s flight to the West). The only question was how much psychological torture she’d endure before she did.

Or maybe the Stasi’s suspicions had centered on the stepdaughter in Leipzig. Or on Horst’s co-workers at the power plant, the ones he’d reported on. Maybe one of them was already in prison for the crime. For weeks after the killing, Andreas had looked at the newspapers every day. If the criminal police had been handling the case, they surely would have put a picture of the missing man in the papers. But no picture ever appeared. The only realistic explanation was that the Stasi was keeping the police out of it.

Assuming he was right about this, he had a further hypothesis: the Stasi had easily broken Annagret, she’d led them to the dacha, and they’d discovered who owned it. To avoid public embarrassment of the undersecretary, they’d accepted Horst’s sexual predation as a mitigating circumstance and contented themselves with scaring the daylights out of Annagret. And to torture Andreas with uncertainty, to make his life a hell of anxiety and hypercaution, they’d left him alone.

He hated this hypothesis, but unfortunately it made more sense than any of the others. He hated it because there was an easy way to test it: find Annagret and ask her. Already scarcely an hour of his waking days passed without his wanting to go to her, and yet, if he was wrong about his hypothesis, and if she was still under suspicion and still being closely watched, it would be disaster for them to meet. Only she could know when they were safe.

He went back to counseling at-risk youths, but there was a new hollowness at his core which never left him. He no longer taught the kids levity. He was at risk himself now — at risk of weeping when he listened to their sad stories. It was as if sadness were a chemical element that everything he touched consisted of. His mourning was mostly for Annagret but also for his old lighthearted, libidinous self. He would have imagined that his primary feeling would be anxiety, the feverish fear of discovery and arrest, but the Republic appeared to be intent on sparing him, for whatever sick reason, and he could no longer remember why he’d laughed at the country and its tastelessness. It now seemed to him more like a Republic of Infinite Sadness. Girls still came to his office door, interested in him, maybe even all the more intrigued by his air of sorrow, but instead of thinking about their pussies he thought about their young souls. Every one of them was an avatar of Annagret; her soul was in all of them.

Meanwhile in Russia there was glasnost, there was Gorby. The true-believing little Republic, feeling betrayed by its Soviet father, cracked down harder on its own dissidents. The police had raided a sister church in Berlin, the Zion Church, and earnestness and self-importance levels were running high on Siegfeldstraße. There was a wartime mood in the meeting rooms. Secluding himself, as always, in the basement, Andreas found that his sorrow hadn’t cured him of his megalomaniacal solipsism. If anything, it was all the stronger. He felt as if his misery had taken over the entire country. As if the state were choking on his crime; as if, unable or unwilling to arrest him, it were determined to rain misery down on everyone else. The embarrassments upstairs were surprised, and perhaps secretly disappointed, when the police failed to raid their own church. But he wasn’t. The state avoided him like a toxin.

Late in the spring of 1989, his anxiety returned. At first he almost welcomed it, as if it were the companion of his AWOL libido, reawakened by warm nights and flowering trees. He found himself drawn to the television in the rectory’s common room to watch the evening news, unexpurgated, on ZDF. The embarrassments watching with him were jubilant, predicting regime collapse within twelve months, and it was precisely the prospect of regime collapse that made him anxious. Part of the anxiety was straightforward criminal worry: he suspected that only the Stasi was keeping the criminal police at bay; that he was safe from prosecution only as long as the regime survived; that the Stasi was (irony of ironies) his only friend. But there was also a larger and more diffuse anxiety, a choking hydrochloric cloud. As Solidarity was legalized in Poland, as the Baltic States broke away, as Gorbachev publicly washed his hands of his Eastern Bloc foster children, Andreas felt more and more as if his own death were imminent. Without the Republic to define him, he’d be nothing. His all-important parents would be nothing, be less than nothing, be dismal tainted holdovers from a discredited system, and the only world in which he mattered would come to an end.