Jonathan Franzen - Purity

She looked over her shoulder again. “I should go back.”

“I have to see you,” he said for no reason except honesty. “It’s killing me not to see you.”

She hardly seemed to be listening; was lost in her unhappiness. “They took my mother away,” she said. “I had to tell them some kind of story. They put her in a psychiatric hospital for addiction, and then she went to prison.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But she’s been writing letters to the police. She wants to know why they didn’t investigate the disappearance. She gets released in February.”

“Did you talk to the police yourself?”

“I can’t see you,” she said, her eyes on the ground. “You did a big thing for me, but I don’t think I can ever see you again.”

“Annagret. Did you talk to the police?”

She shook her head.

“Then maybe we can fix it. Let me try to fix it.”

“I had the most horrible feeling when I saw you. Desire and death and that thing . It’s all mixed up and horrible. I don’t want to want things like that anymore.”

“Let me make it go away.”

“It will never go away.”

“Let me try.”

She murmured something he couldn’t hear above the noise. Possibly I don’t want to want it . Then she ran back to her friend, and the two of them walked away briskly, without looking back.

But there was hope, he decided. Buoyed by it, he started running and kept running all the way to Marx-Engels Platz. Every single person in the street was a hindrance to him. All he cared about was seeing Annagret again. The reason he had to make the murder case go away was that he couldn’t have Annagret unless he did.

But her mother, to whom he now saw that he’d given insufficient thought, was a serious problem. The mother would have no reason to stop pushing for an investigation, and she would soon be out of prison. Pushing, pushing. When the Stasi collapsed, the police could take the case file and initiate their own investigation. Even if he stayed ahead of them, even if he could somehow move the body, the file was bound to surface when the government went down. And what was in the file? He realized that he should have asked Annagret what exactly she’d told the Stasi. Did they know about the dacha? Or had they shut down their investigation as soon as they’d traced her to him?

He went back to Alexanderplatz, hoping to find her again. He searched the crowds until nightfall, to no avail. He considered going to Leipzig — it wouldn’t be hard to locate her sister’s flat, where she presumably was living — but he was afraid he would lose her altogether, lose her permanently, if he tracked her down and pestered her with questions.

And so began two months of impotence and dread. On the night the Wall was breached, he felt like the one sober man in a city of falling-down drunks. Once upon a time, he would have laughed at how ridiculously twenty-eight years of national internment had ended, an improvised remark by an exhausted Schabowski demolishing the entire apparatus, but in the event, when he heard the shouting in the rectory, and when the vicar came running downstairs to break the blessed news to him, he might have been a cosmonaut hearing a space rock puncture the metal skin of his capsule. Air whooshing out, the void invading. While the rectory emptied, everybody hastening to the nearest checkpoint to see for themselves, he stayed huddled in a corner of his bed, his knees drawn up to his chin.

He had not one particle of desire to cross the border. He could have gone to Leipzig and found Annagret, the two of them could have crossed over to the West and never come back, could have found a way to go and live in Mexico, Morocco, Thailand. But even if she wanted a life on the lam, what would be the point? Only in his motherland did his life make sense. It didn’t matter that he hated her, he still couldn’t leave her. In his mind, the only way to save himself was to come to Annagret as the man who’d guaranteed her safety, so that the two of them could walk in public with their heads held high. More than ever, in the chaotic days following the breach, he saw in Annagret his only hope.

He started taking the U-Bahn out to Normannenstraße and mingling with the protesters at the Stasi compound, collecting rumors. The Stasi was said to be shredding and burning documents around the clock. It was said to be hauling them by the truckload to Moscow and Romania. He tried to imagine the scenario in which his own file was destroyed or deported, but the Stasi was undoubtedly being methodically German and working from the top down, attending first to the documents that compromised its own officers and spies, and there were surely enough of those to fill the shredders and furnaces and trucks for months.

When the weather was decent, larger crowds of concerned citizens gathered outside the compound. On ugly afternoons only the hard core showed up, always the same faces, men and women who’d been interrogated and imprisoned for bad reasons and bore adamantine grudges against the ministry. The one Andreas liked best was a guy his own age who’d been spirited off the street in his late teens, after he’d defended a female classmate from the sexual advances of a Stasi commander’s son. He’d been warned once, and he’d ignored the warning. For this, he’d spent six years in two prisons. He retold his story incessantly, to anyone who would listen, and it never failed to move Andreas. He wondered what had become of the girl.

And then one evening in early December, returning to the church, he opened his door and saw, sitting on his bed, calmly reading the Berliner Zeitung , his mother.

His breathing stopped. He just stood in the doorway and looked at her. She was perilously thin but smartly dressed and generally well put together. She folded the newspaper and stood up. “I was curious about where you’ve been living.”

She was still diabolically lovely. Her hair the same unbelievable red. Her features sharper but her skin unwrinkled.

“You have books I’d like to borrow,” she said, moving to his shelves. “It does my heart good to see how many of them are English.” She pulled a title off a shelf. “Do you admire Iris Murdoch as much as I do?”

He found his breath and said, “What brings you here?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Desire to see my only child, after nine years? Is that so strange?”

“I wish you would leave.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I wish you would leave.”

“No, don’t say that,” she said, reshelving the book. “Let’s sit and talk a little bit. Nothing bad can happen to us now. You of all people should be aware of that.”

She was violating the room, violating him, and yet some traitorous part of him was overjoyed to see her. Had spent nine years pining for her. Had looked for her in fifty-three girls without finding her. It was terrible how much he loved her.

“Sit with me,” she said, “and tell me how you are. You look wonderful.” She smiled warmly as her gaze moved up and down him. “My beautiful strong son.”

“I’m not your son.”

“Don’t be silly. We’ve had some hard years, but that’s all behind us now.” The warmth left her smile. “Forty years of living with the swine who drove my father to suicide — that’s all behind us. Forty years of appeasing the stupidest, boringest, meanest, ugliest, most stink-cowardly self-satisfied philistines the world has ever seen. All behind us. Poof!”

Her stream of pejoratives ought to have counted as refreshing honesty, but the self-regard that impelled them was unchanged, and so to him they only deepened her offense. In the old days, she’d been similarly gaily vicious about the U.S. government. He thought he might have to strangle her, to stop her from emitting her toxic self-regard, to save his life. The second murder was always easier than the first.