Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“So let’s sit and talk,” she said.

“No.”

“Andreas,” she said lullingly. “It’s over. It’s been terribly hard for your father, obviously. The one man in this country with real intelligence and integrity. The one person truly trying to serve his country and not himself. He’s inconsolable. I wish you’d come and see him.”

“Not going to happen.”

“Can you not understand and forgive him? You put him in a terrible position. It seems so silly now, but it wasn’t silly then. He could either serve his country or be the father of a state-subverting poet.”

“Not a difficult choice, given that I’m not even his son.”

She sighed. “I wish you’d stop with that.”

He saw that she was right: it didn’t matter. He no longer cared who his father was, couldn’t begin to connect with the younger self to whom it had mattered. Maybe it had to do with his having crushed a man’s skull with a shovel, but his old anger was gone. All that was left were the more basic emotions of love and loathing.

“We’ll be fine,” Katya said. “Even your father. These are just difficult days for him. He’s known for at least five years that the end was coming, but it’s killing him to watch it happen. The new cabinet wants to keep him, but he’s planning to resign at the end of the year. We’ll be fine — he has a brilliant mind, he’s not too old to teach.”

“ All’s well that ends well .”

“He didn’t do anything wrong. There were murderers and thieves in the government, but he wasn’t one of them.”

“Although he did abet them for forty years.”

She pulled herself up straight. “I still believe in socialism — it’s working in France and Sweden. If you want to blame someone, blame the Soviet swine. Your father and I did our best with what we had. I’ll never apologize for that.”

Politics, collective guilt, collaboration — the whole subject bored him more than ever.

“Anyway,” Katya said, “I thought you might want to come home. You can have your old room back, it’s certainly more comfortable than this … room. I imagine you’ll be going back to school, and you can stay with us rent-free. We can start over as a family.”

“That sounds good to you?”

“Honestly, yes. You could stay in the dacha instead if you’d prefer, but that’s a long train ride. There’s also a chance that we’ll be selling it.”

“What?”

“I know, it’s hard to believe, but Wessi speculators are already sniffing all over the city. One of them was out at the Müggelsee, talking to our neighbors, promising hard currency.”

“You’d sell the dacha,” he said dully.

“Well, it’s ugly. Your father doesn’t think so, but that’s just sentimentality. The speculator was talking about bulldozing all the lakefront houses for a golf course. The Wessis aren’t so sentimental.”

Beyond his dread at the thought of bulldozers, he felt betrayed by the Republic. Everything it touched turned to shit. It couldn’t even defend itself against Wessi speculators. He’d known all along how ridiculously inept it was, but its ineptitude wasn’t funny now.

“What are you thinking?” Katya said with a note of coyness.

There was only one thing to be done. He stepped all the way into the room and closed the door behind him. “You want me to come home,” he said.

“It would mean the world to me. It’s time for you to thrive again. With the mind you have, you could have a doctorate in three years.”

“Thriving would be nice, I agree. But you have to do something for me first.”

She pouted. “I’m not sure I like it when you bargain with me.”

“It’s not what you think. I don’t care what you’ve done. Truly I don’t. What I have in mind is something else entirely.”

He watched as a strange thing happened in her face, a subtle but crazy-looking modulation of expressions, some interior struggle made visible — her fantasy of being a loving mother, her resentment at the bother of it. He almost felt sorry for her. She wanted things to be easy for her and had no strength or patience when they weren’t.

“I’ll come home,” he said, “but first I need something from State Security. I need everything they have on me. Every file. I need it in my hands.”

She frowned. “What do they have?”

“Some bad things, possibly. Things that would make it hard for me to thrive. Things that would embarrass you.”

“What did you do? Did you do something?”

He was greatly relieved to hear her ask. Evidently, the Stasi had suspended its investigation on its own initiative, without informing his parents.

“You don’t need to know,” he said. “You just need to get me the files. I’ll take care of it from there.”

“Everybody wants their file now. All over the country, collaborators are quaking in their hideous shoes, and the Stasi knows it. Those files are its insurance policy.”

“Yeah, but I’m guessing that members of the Central Committee are not so afraid. At this point, a request for my files would almost be routine.”

She searched his face with frightened eyes. “What did you do?”

“Nothing you wouldn’t be proud of, if you knew the facts. But the rest of the world might see it differently.”

“I can ask your father,” she said. “But he’s barely recovered from your last transgression. This might not be the best time to mention a new one.”

“Don’t you love me, Mother?”

Cornered by the question, she agreed to try to help him. Before she left the church, it seemed necessary to both of them that they embrace, and what an odd embrace it was, what a sick transaction. She, who wasn’t capable of real love, pretended to love him while he, who really did love her, exploited her pretended love. He took refuge in the chamber of his mind where his purer love of Annagret was locked away.

A week went by, and then another week. Christmas came and went, and still he heard nothing from his mother. Was it possible she’d already gotten the files and read them? Was she rethinking whether she wanted him in her life again? She’d already decided once before that she could live without him.

He finally called her on the day before New Year’s.

“It’s your father’s last day of work,” she said.

“Yeah, I’m a little worried about that,” he said. “His lack of leverage as a private citizen.”

She didn’t reply.

“Mother? Should I be worried?”

“I’m feeling somewhat bullied, Andreas. I feel as if you’re taking advantage of my wish for reconciliation.”

“Did you ask him or didn’t you?”

“I’ve been waiting for the right moment. He’s terribly discouraged. It might be better if you came and asked him yourself.”

“You mean, now that it’s too late?”

“Why don’t you just tell me what you think is in the files. I’m sure it’s not so bad.”

“I can’t believe you let three weeks go by!”

“Please don’t shout at me. You’re forgetting who your relatives are.”

“Markus has nothing to do with domestic operations.”

“His name carries weight. Your family is still royalty in this pigsty. And your father is still on the Central Committee.”

“Well, then, please ask him.”

“First I’d like to know what it is you’re hiding.”

If he’d thought it would help him, he would happily have told her the story, but his instincts told him not to do it — specifically, not to refer in any way to Annagret’s existence. And so he said, instead, “I’m going to be famous, Mother.” This hadn’t occurred to him until this moment, but he recognized the truth of it immediately: he had it in him to be famous. “I’m going to thrive and be famous, and you’re going to be very glad to be my parent. But if you don’t get me the files, I’m going to be famous in a different way. A way you won’t like.”