Jonathan Franzen - Purity

It got worse through the summer. He could no longer bear to watch the news, but even when he locked himself in his room he could hear people in the hallway yammering about the latest developments, the mass emigration through Hungary, the demonstrations in Leipzig, the rumors of a coming coup, because they were all that anyone was talking about. People were still cowed by Honecker and still afraid of Mielke, but Andreas knew in his bones that the jig was almost up. Beyond his anxiety, and aside from his having had not one single thought about what he might do when the regime fell, he felt sadness and pity for the earnest little German socialist boy abandoned by the Soviets. He wasn’t a socialist, but he might as well have been that little boy himself.

On a Tuesday morning in October, after the largest demonstration yet in Leipzig, the young vicar came tapping on his door. The guy ought to have been in giddy spirits, but something was troubling him. Instead of sitting down cross-legged, he paced the room. “I’m sure you heard the news,” he said. “A hundred thousand people in the street and no violence.”

“Hooray?” Andreas said.

The vicar hesitated. “I need to come clean with you about something,” he said. “I should have told you a long time ago — I guess I was a coward. I hope you can forgive me.”

Andreas wouldn’t have figured the guy for an informant, but his preamble had that flavor.

“It’s not that,” the vicar said, reading his thought. “But I did have a visit from the Stasi, about two years ago. Two guys who looked the part. They had some questions about you, and I answered them. They implied that I’d be arrested if you found out they’d been here.”

“But now it turns out that their guns are loaded with daisy seeds.”

“They said it was a criminal matter, but they didn’t say what kind. They showed me a picture of that pretty girl who came here. They wanted to know if you’d spoken to her. I said you might have, because you’re the youth counselor. I didn’t say anything definite. But they also wanted to know if I’d seen you on some particular night. I said I wasn’t sure — you spend so much time alone in your room. The whole time we were having this conversation, I’m pretty sure you were down here, but they didn’t want to see you. And they never came back.”

“That’s all?”

“Nothing happened to you, nothing happened to any of us, and so I assumed that everything was OK. But I felt bad about talking to them and not telling you. I wanted you to know.”

“Now that the ice is melting, the bodies are coming to the surface.”

The vicar bristled. “I think we’ve been good to you. It’s been a good arrangement. I know I probably should have said something earlier. But the fact is we’ve always been a little afraid of you.”

“I’m grateful. Grateful and sorry for any trouble.”

“Is there anything you want to tell me? Did something bad happen to the girl?”

Andreas shook his head, and the vicar left him alone with his anxiety. If the Stasi had come to the church, it meant that Annagret had been questioned and had talked. This meant that the Stasi had at least some of the facts, maybe all of them. But with a hundred thousand people assembling unhindered on the streets of Leipzig, the Stasi’s days were obviously numbered. Before long, the VoPos would take over, the real police would do police work …

He jumped up from his bed and put on a coat. If nothing else, he now knew he had little to lose by seeing Annagret. Unfortunately, the only place he could think of to look for her was the Erweiterte Oberschule nearest to her old neighborhood in Friedrichshain. It seemed inconceivable that she’d proceeded to an EOS , and yet what else would she be doing? He left the church and hurried through the streets, taking some comfort in their enduring drabness, and stationed himself by the school’s main entrance. Through the high windows he could see students continuing to receive instruction in Marxist biology and Marxist math. When the last hour ended, he scanned the faces of the students streaming out the doors. He scanned until the stream had dwindled to a trickle. He was disappointed but not really surprised.

He returned to the school the next morning, again with no luck. He went to the office of a family-services caseworker he particularly trusted, waited while she checked the central registry, and left empty-handed. For the next week, every afternoon and evening, he loitered outside judo clubs, at sports centers, at bus stops in Annagret’s old neighborhood. By the end of October, he’d given up hope of finding her, but he continued to wander the streets. He trawled the margins of protests, both planned and spontaneous, and listened to ordinary citizens risking imprisonment by demanding fair elections, free travel, the neutering of the Stasi. Honecker was gone, the new government was in crisis, and every day that passed without violence made a Tiananmen-style crackdown seem less likely. Hungary had already liberated itself, the others would surely soon follow. Change was coming, and there was nothing he could do but wait to be engulfed by it. The Berlin air tasted hydrochloric to him.

And then, on November 4, a miracle. Half the city had bravely taken to the streets. He was moving through crowds methodically, scanning faces, smiling at a loudspeakered voice of reason rejecting reunification and calling for reform instead. On Alexanderplatz, toward the ragged rear of the crowd, among the claustrophobes and undecideds, his heart gave a lurch before his brain knew why. There was a girl. A girl with spikily chopped hair and a safety-pin earring, a girl who was nonetheless Annagret. Her arm was linked with the arm of a similarly coiffed girl. Both of them blank-faced, aggressively bored. She’d ceased to be the good girl.

WE MUST FIND OUR OWN WAY, WE MUST LEARN TO TAKE THE BEST FROM OUR IMPERFECT SYSTEM AND THE BEST FROM THE SYSTEM WE OPPOSED …

As if seeking relief from the boringness of the amplified voice, Annagret looked around the crowd and saw Andreas. Her eyes widened. He was smiling uncontrollably. She didn’t smile back, but she did put her mouth to the ear of the other girl and break away from her. As she approached him, he could see more clearly how changed her demeanor was, how unlikely it was that she might still love him. She stopped short of embrace range.

“I can only talk for a minute,” she said.

“We don’t have to talk. Just tell me where I can find you.”

She shook her head. Her radical haircut and the safety pin in her ear were helpless against her beauty, but her unhappiness wasn’t. Her features were the same as two years ago, but the light in her eyes had gone out.

“Trust me,” he said. “There’s no danger.”

“I’m in Leipzig now. We’re only up for the day.”

“Is that your sister?”

“No, a friend. She wanted to be here.”

“I’ll come and see you in Leipzig. We can talk.”

She shook her head.

“You don’t want to see me again,” he said.

She looked carefully over one shoulder and then over the other. “I don’t even know. I’m not thinking about that. All I know is we’re not safe. That’s all I can think about.”

“We’re safe as long as there’s a ministry.”

“I should go back to my friend.”

“Annagret. I know you talked to the ministry. They came to the church and asked about me. But nothing happened, they didn’t question me. We’re safe. You did the right thing.”

He moved closer. She flinched and edged away from him.

“We’re not safe,” she said. “They know a lot. They’re just waiting.”

“If they know so much anyway, it doesn’t matter if we’re seen together. They’ve already waited two years. They’re not going to do anything to us now.”